Not even a day after California Sen. Kamala Harris announced her presidential bid for 2020, people—specifically racist people—are already shouting “WHERE’S HER BIRTH CERTIFICATE” into the meaningless black hole of Twitter dot com.
Jacob Wohl, a 20-year-old hipster coffee shop connoisseur who most notably failed to falsely accuse Special Counsel Robert Mueller of sexual harassment in an operation that included his mom’s phone number, tweeted on Tuesday alleging that Harris wasn’t a natural-born citizen. His theory goes that even though she was born in the U.S., her dad and mom—who were from Jamaica and India, respectively—weren’t legal residents before then.
Harris’ parents’ citizenship status has no bearing on Harris, as she was born in Oakland, CA. This is a stupid, nonsensical, unworthy argument lodged against Harris, who—similarly to the last Democratic candidate whose eligibility to serve as president is somehow still hotly contested by right-wing racists—also happens to be black.
Leave it to CNN’s Chris Cuomo, however, to give an inkling of credibility to someone who doesn’t know how to get past a simple reverse-image search. Cuomo tweeted, and then later deleted, this: a jumble of words which seemed to imply Cuomo was placing an equal responsibility to prove or disprove this nonsense on both Harris and the racist right-wing cranks who believe it:
As you can probably guess, Chris, who might not even be the worst Cuomo, immediately began tweeting through it:
Eventually, Cuomo just deleted the mystifying original tweet and tried to clear things up by saying the tweet was “taken literally the opposite way that I intended it.”
Just another normal day on the web for one of the featured communicators on one of the biggest cable news networks in the world. Next time, just leave it alone, Chris.